Numerous examples of real time services arise in the service industry that can be modeled as loss systems. These include agent staffing for call centers, provisioning bandwidth for private line services, making rooms available for hotel reservations and congestion pricing for parking spaces. Given that arriving customers make their decision to join the system based on the current service price,...

O nline advertising has transformed the advertising industry with its measurability and accountability. Online software and services supported by online advertising is becoming a reality as evidenced by the success of Google and its initiatives. Therefore, the choice of a pricing model for advertising becomes a critical issue for these firms. We present a formal model of pricing models in onlin...

The idea of representing choice under uncertainty as a trade-off between mean returns and some measure of risk or uncertainty is fundamental to the analysis of investment decisions. In this paper, we show that preferences can be characterized in this way, even in the absence of objective probabilities. We develop a model of uncertainty averse preferences that is based on a mean and a measure of...